Centuries-old maple sugar industry relies on new technology to survive in Pioneer Valley

NORTHAMPTON – In maple sugaring, as in most kinds of agriculture, success or failure of a season depends largely on the weather. But even in an unusual season like the current one, producers agree innovative technology is giving them a fighting chance.

“If my grandfather saw all this stuff, he’d roll over in his grave,” said Keith Dufresne, a fourth-generation maple producer. “It used to be you collected the sap with horses or oxen, boiled it in a flat pan and you got what you got. They couldn’t conceive of what we’re doing now.”

Dufresne’s Sugar House on Route 9 in Williamsburg is a major maple operation, thanks largely to the innovations that make it easier to collect and boil the sap.

When he started sugaring with his father, they collected sap from 300 metal buckets and it took hours to get around snowy woods on a tractor every day. They produced around 30 gallons of syrup a year, he said.

Now, he collects sap from 8,000 taps, and boils it in a shining stainless steel, food-grade evaporator to create more than 1,000 gallons of syrup every season.

Dufresne’s higher production numbers are not an anomaly. Modern methods and new technology are allowing maple sugarers to produce higher quantities of syrup, while reducing the time and fuel required to do so. Many of the innovations are especially important when the weather is less than ideal for sugaring, he said, such as this year’s unseasonably warm temperatures.

And the results are in: maple syrup production in New England has more than doubled in the past decade, from 600,000 gallons in 2001 to 1.7 million in 2011, according to New England agricultural statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Leo Aloisi said his sugaring operation at Hanging Mountain Farm in Westhampton has benefited from the efficiency of innovations, including the development of a food-grade defoamer that is much more pleasant than the method previously used to reduce foam that builds on top of boiling sap.

“They used to use suet instead,” he said, while sprinkling the defoaming powder, made of vegetable oil, over the steaming evaporator. “I have vivid memories from when I was about 5 years old or so of my father dipping chunks of suet in it, or sometimes they would
hang the suet on a string over the evaporator.”

While both producers agree that technology makes their jobs easier, they admit some of the “romance” of the sugaring process can be lost in the upgrades.

It isn’t easy to scrap the traditional methods for new ones, Aloisi said, remembering how his father was unsure about switching from metal buckets to plastic pipelines in 1988. “But with buckets, I could only get to half the taps in a day,” he said. “And there were many times that I’d be carrying buckets through two feet of snow and falling and spilling the sap all over myself.”

Since plastic tubing largely replaced buckets, the most important innovation has been the vacuum system, said Dufresne, who installed one in 2002. “Vacuum is key in a crummy year, there’s no way around it,” he said.

Aloisi, who drills more than 1,200 taps, said the use of vacuum technology revolutionized sap collection at Hanging Mountain Farm when he implemented it in 2002. Naturally, sap flows from a tree’s taphole when the pressure inside the tree is greater than that outside the tree, he explained, which happens when temperatures rise above freezing. When the vacuum lowers the pressure in the taphole, it “kind of fools the tree into thinking it’s lower pressure outside, so the sap runs easier,” he said.

The taps have also become smaller over the years, which allows trees to heal faster after they are removed, Aloisi said. The new plastic taps include a check valve that prevents sap from going back into the tree, he said, which happens because the tree develops a natural vacuum during freezing temperatures.

The exterior of Dufresne’s Sugar House looks like a traditional sugar shack, but inside, the floor is concrete, the walls are washable white plastic and all the equipment is stainless steel. Most noticeable is the absence of the billowing steam that fills most sugar houses, pouring off an open evaporator.

“This is a covered hood,” he said, pointing to the large piece of equipment that covers the evaporator, channeling the steam up through the roof through steel vents. “This is what the federal government wants now.”

Since Dufresne ships so much of his syrup across state lines – his best customers are upscale restaurants in California – he has to comply with federal regulations for food safety. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the rules have gotten more restrictive, he added.

Aloisi said he knows inspectors prefer to see the hood, which would prevent other substances from falling into the evaporator. But since the sap is boiled at 250 degrees, there is little risk that bacteria or other contaminants could survive, he said.

And for him, a sugarhouse thick with steam is part of what makes sugaring, well, sugaring. “I still like the romance of the open boil,” he said.

Dufresne said regulations about sugaring are making his operation “factory-like.”

“People visiting a sugarhouse want to see the quaint, romantic stuff, like the dirt floor and the steam, but this is what’s coming,” he said.

One of his high-tech pieces of equipment is a reverse osmosis machine, which removes about 70 percent of water from the sap so it does not have to boil as long, he said. Since he installed the $35,000 machine in 2003, he uses less than half as much wood as before.

Other technological innovations at Dufresne Sugar House include a preheater, which increases the efficiency by using the steam coming off the evaporator pan to preheat the sap before it enters the pan. Aloisi and Dufresne also both use automatic draw-off units, which remove syrup from the evaporator pan when it reaches the right density, reducing the risk of burning the batch.

At Paul’s Sugar House in Williamsburg, owner Paul Zononi installed an $18,000 gasifier boiler after he received a state grant in 2010. The boiler collects unburned gases from the fire that would normally escape up the chimney, and reignites them to continue to heat the evaporator.

Dufresne said there are many other technological innovations to increase efficiency of boiling, but they can’t make the sap run. “Every day is different, that’s what makes it exciting,” he said. “And you can have the best technology out there, but it can’t help you if the weather doesn’t happen.”